Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Hard to keep coming up with creative new titles for these, so may as well just stick with the time-tested one.

Dear AE, please stop being naive & guilble.

You're blinded & deceived by the devil.

I pray that you, along with every fellow atheist find the light through all the darkness you all

remain In & accept our Lord Jesus Christ as your almighty saviour.

Whats the purpose of preaching atheism, when you don't go anywhere after life?

Whats the point?

You say us Chrisitans are waisting precious time here on earth, while thats quite hypocritical.

You preach atheism, aren't you waisting precious time as well?

Us christians actually believe In a beautiful life after death with our king & saviour, so we have

more then a reason to preach, It's our purpose.

We want to save people from there sin & the devil because we love them & don't want them to end

up In hell.

Whats your purpose?

Life Is a lesson that we're here to learn & experience, our reward Is heaven.

All of you are being controlled by the devil, you don't even know It because you cease to have an

open mind, you cease to even try to understand his existence because Its much to difficult.

You would rather just take the easy way In life & say there Isn't a God.

You would rather be your own God, have your own control, your own reasone for existence because

thats what YOU want & find easiest.

Quite honestly, I think life as an Atheist would be quite sad & depressing because to think we are

only here once & that all this that we're living currently Is all for nothing?

That would mean there Is absolutely no purpose for anything.

I'm not going to get Into detail because as long as you all keep that hard head of yours, you won't

ever see the truth & you will end up pershing in hell for the rest of eternity.

For your sake, please try & see the truth.

Call out to the lord & ask for his help, he won't let you down.

Seek him diligently & you shall find.

It takes time, but be patient & wait on the Lord because those that remain patient & wait on the

Lord have a special place In the kingdom of God.

There Is all to much Info out there, you just need

to seek diligently & you shall find.

Start of by praying, asking for forgivness, accepting Jesus as your Lord/saviour & then ask him to

come Into your life & he will.

Then pick a bible up & start studying, you will see the truth.

You will finally experience the peace that comes with knowing & following him.

We love you, may God bless & have mercy on you.

[name deleted]

I like this one because it's the complete opposite of the usual, unreadable "dozens of sentence crammed into a single giant paragraph" format that we often see. Instead of that, every sentence in this message has its own paragraph, and sometimes the paragraph breaks occur within a single sentence.

Also, for some unfathomable reason, it looks to me like every word that begins with the letter "I" is capitalized, ("It", "Is", "In") as if the author was chided too many times for failing to capitalize the first person pronoun, and he went to the opposite extreme. A little knowledge being a dangerous thing, and all that.

I may be accused to responding to this email's style over its substance, but really, in a case like this, what the hell else can you do?

I'm not sure, but the odd formatting could be due to bad line breaking if they wrote the email in one client and then copy and pasted it to send in something else. However, there seem to be too many breaks at the right point for that to be the case.

If one did want to respond, one would presumably explain that many atheists are people who had at one point accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior.

Or to point out that there's a distinction between wasting time because what one is doing has no connection to objective validity and wasting time because the letter writer thinks everything is meaningless without God. The writer doesn't seem to see the difference.

Ah well, probably many other things one could say. But you are correct that there's really not much one can say to this sort of thing that has any chance of being listened to.

I love it when they say that. Don't they know that many atheists have read the bible? I have read it front to back at least 2 times. That's why I'm an atheist. Because, I don't like books that tell me to stone disobedient children and I most certainly wouldn't consider such a book as a moral authority.

My favourite part of this email was the bit about being controlled by the devil. I thought god gave us free will. If I am being controlled by an outside influence surely I cannot he held accoutable for my actions. Its the perfect get out of hell free card.

Rather than spend time reading the Bible, this dude ought to spend some time learning to spell. I particularly like the use of 'pershing' for, I assume, perishing. It seems that a disproprtionate number of theists are unable to construct cogent, grammatically correct sentences. This may be the result of frenzied keyboard bashing while frothing at the mouth with outrage.

Great advice read the bible and discover the truth. The truth of the bible is that god is a raving maniac. Even in the new testament it is still into blood sacrifice and the good book ends with the acid trip of revelations.

There is nothing like the bible to make satan look good. At least he had the good sense to rebel against the "all loving" psychopath.

I think you're correct about the capital "I" when they begin a word. I can almost see him/ her being told in grade school they need to capitalize the letter, misunderstanding what was said, and then never ever figuring out the way it really works. I find things like that fascinating. Of course, We're not sure that this person isn't actually still in the second grade either. Or maybe is home schooled and is behaving exactly as taught. Or maybe it's an alien communicating through a faulty translator. Or a coincidence of typos.

@ Joshua"I'm not sure, but the odd formatting could be due to bad line breaking if they wrote the email in one client and then copy and pasted it to send in something else. However, there seem to be too many breaks at the right point for that to be the case."

Almost certain that copy/paste was involved. A few thoughts on that: 1) Whatever app they copied from...didn't have spellcheck?(Or maybe the writer--well, paste & sender anyhow--disregards the red lines as being "from de debil". Interesting. Pretty sure it's proper to put "spell" and "check" together when describing the function in a text processing app. But apparently "spellcheck" isn't listed as a proper word in, well, spellcheck.)2) Seems likely the entire screed was pasted. (No personalization; writing style and glitchy formatting throughout) Why do that? To send the same exhorting testimony to multiple sinners-in-need-of-The-Word. Yep, they figured that message wasn't just good enough to send to one sinner. It's, in effect, "broadcast quality". Uh...yeah.

Christian beat poetry won't take off? How about Christian rock? Or even (FSM preserve us) rap?

@ Jonah"What a waist of thyme."

And from such an apparent sage source. Note, though, that the author's use of "waist", etc would at least pass spell check, though they're homonyms for the word meant. Many of the author's words, though, were 'of a Kind unto themselves' (which would've been redlined).

@ TenduBravo for linking the Xian beat poetry to Tim Minchin's Storm. I love that piece and his work in general. Many here may already know it. If not, add it to your "things to watch on youtube" list.

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